Yeah full agree. I was honestly quite fine with 38c because I was mostly planning on riding on paved roads and quite nice gravel roads (plenty of those in southern Sweden). But if I can buy pretty much the same bike but ALSO have the possibility to send it down some gnarlier stuff with huge tires... I mean it's a pretty easy call.
As an aside - don't know if I'm fooling myself but I swear the fork looks different than LCR018-D, cooler somehow (from the side).
Anyways, how are you planning on building it up?
Same here. 38C would get the job done for 99% of my riding around the New York City area. A vast majority of my rides would be on our (relatively crappy) city streets, so ~35C tires would be ideal. Nearly all of the gravel around NYC would be fine on 38Cs with some tread. But there are a few routes a bit farther afield that would benefit from 45Cs, and I would hate to exclude myself from those rides if I don't have to. My current bike is an aluminum gravel bike (GT Grade Comp), so I can access those trails, but the geometry is so long and slack that it feels a bit like steering a boat on the road. This LCG072 seems to make no trade-offs in terms of geometry that would affect me on the vast majority of the courses I ride. Pretty compelling.
Anyway, I've already got two wheelsets... one Elitewheels Drive (gen 1) 50D running Conti GP5K 32C for road duty and one Elitewheels Marvel G35 running Pirelli Cinturato Gravel H 45C for gravel duty. Idea would be to build this frame up with a GRX 2x12 Di2 groupset, british racing green custom paint, with brown saddle & bar tape. I've always lusted after that color combo.
Also re: the fork, yeah I think it's a new design. I started a thread about this on the Chinese Carbon subreddit and someone mentioned that Lightcarbon did redesign the fork for even more clearance, but that's unverified info since few details about this frameset exist in the real world.
How would you build this one up?
